While the pandemic ravages the city, wealthy urbanites flee to a secluded estate to hide in comfort—whether it’s 1348 and we’re talking about the protagonists of Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th-century masterpiece The Decameron, or it’s 2020 and we’re talking about the Manhattanites having their mail delivered to the Hamptons in limos.

As history repeats itself, so will art. Revisiting the books, stories, and paintings created after past plagues can help contextualize our lives under the specter of COVID-19—and predict the stories we may tell as a result. “Good writing about a plague is never just about the plague,” said Jennifer Wright, author of Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them. “It’s about the other social issues made manifest in times of plague. Angels in America is not just about AIDS, it’s not even just about how Reagan responded to AIDS. It’s about how Americans deal with the idea of our mortality.”

Similarly, The Decameron—in which characters pass time by telling each other stories—offers a multilayered commentary on its own time. The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of Europe’s population, wiping out skilled workers in every trade, and leading to total social upheaval. “If you were a serf but could make a table, you suddenly had a new occupation, and no longer had to work for your lord and master,” Wright explained. “It created a level of social mobility that hadn’t been seen before.”

It also created a vacuum in the church. Clergymen who gave last rites to those struck by the plague wound up dying themselves. “So the church fills up with basically anybody who wants to apply,” said Wright, “and they’re not necessarily people leading Christ–like lives.”

Several of The Decameron’s tales-within-a-tale depict unscrupulous church leaders. “The Catholic clergy is revealed to be incredibly corrupt in almost every single story,” Wright explained. Traditional-role subversion in general is one of Boccaccio’s key themes. “Eager peasantry are revealed to be smarter than the aristocrats, and women are revealed smarter and more virtuous than men.”

Long story short, she added, “Anytime there is a plague, there are thoughts about whether the people leading us are the people most qualified to lead us.”

The great quarantine of 2020 will certainly produce a flood of manuscripts and screenplays—if mostly from those who have the privilege of staying home without caring for family members or young children. What will minds percolating on this pandemic yield? Wright had a few ideas.

Economic inequality

Without a doubt, there will be art about income disparity, a reality for which COVID-19 provides increasing evidence. See the test surfeit in Beverly Hills, for example, and Spain’s move to institute universal basic income. That’s typical for this type of crisis: Income disparity is something people have considered “with the outbreak of almost every plague in history,” said Wright, since wealthy communities have always had better access to health care and safety.

For a slightly more vigilante take than The Decameron offers, look to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” Like in the Boccaccio tale, a group of nobles flee a pandemic. (Poe’s is fictional, though many believe it was inspired by his experiences with tuberculosis and cholera.) Unlike in The Decameron, the disease eventually comes for its victims in the form of a masked reveler.

The inevitability of death

Also sure to dominate our bookshelves and streaming-device home screens are stories about mortality. “I think there will be more of a mindfulness of death in our art in the years to come. People are being reminded now that life does not go on forever,” Wright said.

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Take, for instance, the danse macabre genre of art developed in Europe in the early 1400s. In these didactic images, skeletons dance both with each other and with living people, offering two lessons: life is brief, so be pious; and life is brief, so dance. “Those metaphorical skeletons exist in our minds now,” Wright said. And that’s a good thing. Awareness of mortality “motivates people to live accordingly. And that seeps into art.”

The end of the superhero’s reign

We may see a resurgence of smaller, human stories about relationships as well. It’s often posited that the popularity of superhero movies grew out of September 11: “People wanted to feel like America was invincible, could take on terrorism, and could win,” Wright argued. Today, though, we see viral videos of Italians singing to each other from balconies and New Yorkers shouting thanks from their windows to health care workers. “We are realizing that nobody is invincible when it comes to illness, and also how important it is to be surrounded by people you love.”

The previously invisible

Underrepresented communities tend to be made visible by pandemics. “Even if you lived in a small town and wanted to pretend that nobody you’d ever met was gay, you couldn’t really ignore that after AIDS,” Wright said. After the worst of the crisis, there was a spike in media and films about the gay experience in America. Years later, as the gay-marriage debate raged, then vice president Joe Bidentold Meet the Press, “I think Will & Grace did more to educate the American public more than almost anything anybody has done so far.”

Today, Wright said, people are starting to understand that “society really requires the skills of people who work in grocery stores and pharmacies, nurses, groups of people that we’ve been underpaying for a really long time.” Expect to see more protagonists who wear uniforms or aprons. Will that kind of visibility eventually help such workers earn a livable wage?

Wright was hopeful but doubtful, guessing that many Americans will want to forget about this scary, sad time as soon as possible. (Among them, of course, is our current president.) “Americans only like stories where they emerge as the victors,” Wright said. “Americans don’t like to think about things like the Spanish Flu”—one of the only pandemics in history that didn’t produce a spate of art representing the national or international psyche, Wright said, allowing of course for notable exceptions (e.g., Edvard Munch’s “Self Portrait With the Spanish Flu”). For that, we can probably blame the suppression of press reports of the disease by officials determined to boost morale—and governments that kept attention focused on World War I. Only years later did the average person understand the severity of the disease and its spread.

In Angels in America, Wright noted, playwright Tony Kushner “touches on how America is not a good country for sick people. He writes that Ronald Reagan ‘takes a slug in his chest, and two days later, he’s out West riding ponies in his PJs.’”

Today, most Americans are staying home in their PJs. Only time will tell how victorious we ultimately will be, and whether the coronavirus will inspire true social change. Until then, we can turn to art from plagues past to remind ourselves that our ancestors have faced times like these. “Know that you’re not alone. Humanity survived,” Wright said. “We’re still here, and we keep going.”